Today, many wireless terminals are capable of providing a wide variety of telecommunications services. For instance, a terminal may be capable of providing circuit-switched speech and data transfer services, packet-switched data transfer services and messaging services, such as SMS (Short Message Service). These services may be provided via one type of network or different types of networks. For instance, the packet-switched data transfer service of the terminal may be provided by a connection to a wireless local area network (WLAN) access point, and the circuit-switched services may be provided by a connection to a public land mobile network (PLMN).
To provide a continuous service for the user, a mobile terminal has to carry out a handover process to change from one channel or bearer service to another. This change of channel may also cause the change of base station or another network element, such as a network element controlling a base station or a core network element, for example a mobile switching centre or a support node of packet-switched services. It should be noted that handover may even occur to another kind of system (inter-system handover), for example between a GSM network and 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) UMTS network (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and/or WLAN.
Thus, there may be many alternative access services and thereby also alternative settings (possibly alternative collections of settings) available. The terminal has to decide which of the available network connections should be established to replace the original connection. A handover algorithm conventionally decides on handover on the basis of the signal qualities and/or some other quality information of the available radio access channels, i.e. selects the radio access channel with best quality. Thus, the connection settings associated with the radio access node (e.g. WLAN access point) selected by the handover algorithm are then used to establish the new connection. However, it is possible that some of the available access networks or logical access nodes are not connected to other networks or, for some other reason, it is not possible to establish a connection from there to a desired target network entity. For instance, missing roaming agreements may cause this situation. Therefore, when this kind of network resource is selected, for example based on the signal strength in a handover algorithm in the terminal, the connection is lost after handover.